Ladling water into a sinking boat

While European bankers continue to wrestle with the Greek debt question and look set to waste further tens of billions of euros to be poured into its shattered economy, perhaps the best summing-up came from redoubtable Eurosceptic Douglas Carswell.

Rare memorabilia linked to the Rolling Stones guitarist Brian Jones, has disappeared from a pub

As the Tory MP for Clacton says of the EU’s latest “rescue” package: “This must be the only bailout in history where you ladle more water into the boat.”

Rare memorabilia linked to the Rolling Stones guitarist Brian Jones, has disappeared from a pub in his home town. The Wheatsheaf Inn in Cheltenham includes a museum to the band’s founder member who was found dead in his swimming pool in 1969, aged 27.

Originally seen as the leader of the group he had left the Stones a month previously after being superseded by the Mick Jagger-Keith Richards songwriting partnership. The missing items include photos and a replica of his guitar.

“They belong to people from all over the world and most of the items are one-off originals,” says a spokesman for Jones’s official fan club. Members still make an annual pilgrimage to his grave in the town each July.

Rare memorabilia linked to the Rolling Stones guitarist Brian Jones, has disappeared from a pub

Bizarre fact of the week: Glenn Mulcaire, the private investigator at the heart of this week’s phone hacking scandal, has another claim to a place in history.

During his previous career as a footballer (when his nickname was apparently Trigger) he scored the first ever goal for the then newly-reformed AFC Wimbledon back in 2002.

It’s happened to all of us who have tried to play the hip daddy-o in middle age.

Jason Isaacs, 48, who plays major bad guy Lucius Malfoy one last time in a certain wizard epic, says: “I have Lady Gaga hair in the Harry Potter films. But then I told someone younger than me that I wanted Lucius to look like Madam Gaga. Totally got her name wrong – I blew it.”

Is this the first case of a country using the recent violent deaths of its own citizens as a way of persuading tourists to go on holiday there? Tunisia is wooing potential visitors with billboards in London of a woman receiving a massage alongside the slogan: “They say that in Tunisia some people receive heavy-handed treatment.”

For the record at least 200 were killed in the Tunisian uprising, which began last December and led to the overthrow of dictator Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali.

“Now the dictatorship has gone. It’s over. Today it’s a new Tunisia.” Book early, as the late Sir Fred Pontin used to say.

In his latest incarnation as a novelist former Labour MP and TV presenter Robert Kilroy-Silk has a new publication out on Amazon’s Kindle. Called Closure, its press release claims that the book “chronicles the disintegration of a middle-class English woman’s family confronted with the social and economic pressures of Britain – a son fighting in Afghanistan, a husband sacked for whistle-blowing, a married daughter conducting an illicit affair, the business of her son-in-law collapsing and her elderly mother put in a residential home”.